The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

There is no pre-requisite to the enjoyment of philosophy, and there is no pre-requisite to the Story of Philosophy. Simply bring a mind that is famished for an injection of joy. "That is very good; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?" (Durant summarizing Socrates) Philosophy is the night that you looked up at those 100 billion stars and 100 billion galaxies and realized that you were beginning to ask the right questions. "To know what to ask is already to know half." (Durant summarizing Aristotle) Philosophy is the one great conversation in your past that echoes in every conversation since. When will that time come again? "All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare." (Durant summarizing Spinoza) That phenomenon of wonder will return when you open the "Story of Philosophy". A further taste of Durant's warming liquor: "Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement." "How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms." "Political science does not make men, but must take them as they come from nature." "The chief condition of happiness, barring certain physical prerequisites, is the life of reason--the specific glory and power of man." Durant's approach is linear in time, but immense in breadth. Beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we are not only granted access to their treasure chests of wisdom, we are also given insights into the men. Durant introduces the era before he introduces the philosopher, for humanity inspires humanity, and these giants have benefactors of their own. Durant considers history as important an aspect of philosophy as metaphysics, and here he shines with a polished historian's touch (see Will Durant - "Story of Civilization"). "Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races of men and of diverse cults and customs, whose contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis, and thought." "Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become skeptical of them all." Durant runs the gauntlet of great thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Nietzsche), and introduces you to some odd-looking but strong-eyed and delightful strangers (Schopenhauer, Spencer, Bergson, Croce, Russell, Santayana, James, Dewey). "How can we explain mind as matter, when we know matter only through mind?" (summarizing Schopenhauer) "We often forget that not only is there a soul of goodness in things evil, but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous." (summarizing Spencer) "In ourselves, memory is the vehicle of duration, the handmaiden of time; and through it so much of our past is actively retained that rich alternatives present themselves for every situation. As life grows richer in its scope, its heritage and its memories, the field of choice widens, and at last the variety of possible responses generates consciousness, which is the rehearsal of response... Free will is a corollary of consciousness; to say that we are free is merely to mean that we know what we are doing." (summarizing Bergson) How many of these men have you missed in the crowd of history? And how many days will pass before you make their acquaintance? What will your future be like once you hold their wisdom in your hands? Durant believes it will be a far richer one. The Story of Philosophy actually contains more summary than quote, and we would normally cringe at such an announcement. Only the bravest of souls would wade into the brine of further philosophical precis. But Durant is the encapsulation of the finest teachers you have met in this lifetime, and his abridgements multiply the reader's comprehension while encouraging cross-referencing with the originals, making the entire experience savory and thoroughly digestible. Durant is the rare case of a man who can interpret wisdom and also construct it anew. The result is maybe the highest ratio of wisdom-to-words of any book in the Library of Humanity. Compare his extractions of Kant with an original text of the babbling scholar: "Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity." (summarizing Kant) "The real church is a community of people, however scattered and divided, who are united by devotion to the common moral law." (summarizing Kant) "Kant was too anxious to prove the subjectivity of space, as a refuge from materialism; he feared the argument that if space is objective and universal, God must exist in space, and be therefore spatial and material." After 50 pages of Durant on Kant, you will be praying for the entire translation. But Durant moved on to other fine thinkers, and, after 500+ pages of wisdom, you will rejoice that the balance of his substantial catalog is over 10,000 pages (Lessons of History, Story of Civilization - 11 vols.). Within one year of the original printing (1926), the work found its way onto the nightstands of the scholarly and the coffee tables of the middle-class. It inspired a flood of "Story of ..." books whose words are now lost to the past. It was, and still is, the primary text for many university philosophy curricula. For those who have read it, Story of Philosophy is probably their "trapped on a desert island with one book" selection. That the work remains in print and in demand three generations later is a testament to the author and to the subject... both mighty fine creations.

Many of us owe a great debt to Will Durant, whose "The Story of Philosophy" and multi-volume world history (co-authored with wife Ariel) were the great introduction to the Western past for us in our youth. "The Story of Philosophy" is a book with its flaws, but it will remain for some time the great popular intro to the philosophical canon. Durant peppered his book with many all-too-pious genuflections to the little joys of life: he distrusted brooders, and at his worst he's not above accusing Schopenhauer of paying too little attention to the laughter of children. His Nietzsche chapter is unreliable on biographical points, and too mistrustful in a post-WWI way of that dazzlingly complex thinker (some criticisms are fair-- but when, for instance, did the mature Nietzsche ever admire Bismark?) Durant often drags out his bromide that Catholic countries produce extremes of piety and atheism, while Protestant countries, with a presumably superior moderation, keep people within decent liberal modes of Protestantism and deism-- he seems little to entertain the notion that atheists are so out of reasoned conviction rather than ill temper and social rebellion. His chapter on Spinoza constantly employs anthropomorphic language for Spinoza's radically anti-anthropocentric conception of God: he practically baptizes the "Ethics." His "Comment" and "Criticism" chapters usually charge Plato with not being Aristotle, or Aristotle not being Plato, and so on. And, as his introduction admits, Durant is no fan of epistemology-- but I submit that he is dangerously wrong to treat it as a subject fit only for the physical sciences. But why is the book great? Because, these objections aside, Durant is a terrifically energetic and witty writer, an obvious relation, temperamentally as well as in conviction, of Voltaire, whose place in this book in the absence of Locke or Hume is, ultimately, justified by the liveliness of the account of Voltaire's life and times. His Spinoza chapter is moving, his account of Kant judicious, and in general Durant has a brilliant sense of Zeitgeist. If his treatment of Plato is too schematic, his Bacon is a well-deserved treatment of that Renaissance genius, and his final sketches of then-contemporaries like Santayana, James, and Bergson, is a good antidote to our contemporary overreliance on Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger. And he is never slow to tell the reader to forget the synopsis and read the books themselves. A dazzling display of good host-duties, "The Story of Philosophy" remains a wonderful introduction to the riches of philosophy.

I spent nearly 30 years of my pre-retirement adult life teaching philosophy at the college level, having prior to this received my doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. Several years ago, because of an ongoing secondary interest in the history of Western civilization, I began reading through Will and Ariel Durant's multivolume "The Story of Civilization," a project that took me three years to complete. I found it to be a thorough (albeit slightly dated) summary of the history of Western civilization through the time of Napoleon. Because I was no longer teaching and had a bit of time on my hands, I decided to read through Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy," a work that I had never had the opportunity to peruse during my professional career. I figured it would offer a refresher course on some of the philosophers who had less bearing on the areas of philosophy I regularly taught. I also hoped that it would give me some fresh insights into the philosophers and philosophical movements with which I possessed a degree of familiarity. The book was not what I expected. I will note why momentarily. First, however, the positive. As I knew from having read his "Story of Civilization," Will Durant is an engaging writer. He is eloquent without being flowery or effete. His vocabulary is extensive, but he does not use it to show off his erudition. In no way is he pretentious. He is also able to explain difficult ideas in a straightforward, understandable fashion, certainly a boon when discussing the theories of philosophers. And he is good at explaining how the thought of a philosopher flows from and contrasts with that of his forbears. However, if one is expecting a true history of philosophy, this is not the book to read. I would go so far as to say that the title of the book is quite misleading. This is not the story of philosophy. It is the story of the writings of those philosophers who, for whatever reason, Durant wants to highlight. The book pays no significant attention to ancient philosophy before Socrates or after Aristotle. While Socrates/Plato and Aristotle are examined in detail, subsequent developments in Greek and Roman thought are either covered in a most sketchy manner or absent altogether. For example, neo-Platonism in general and Plotinus in particular, are ignored. Even more shocking is Durant's treatment of the entire middle ages. It is in fact a non-treatment. Without explanation (other than that Durant doesn't think it is important) we skip over nearly a thousand years of Western thought and quickly find ourselves studying the philosophy of Francis Bacon. One could read this book without being aware of philosophers such as Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and many others (not to mention the Islamic philosophers of the tenth and eleventh centuries). When we come to post-medieval philosophy, while we are treated to a fairly detailed explication of Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Kant, Durant doesn't even mention Descartes (sometimes regarded as the father of modern philosophy) or the British Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) except by way of extremely brief references when presenting the thought of other philosophers. Durant does somewhat better in describing the major figures of nineteenth century philosophy. Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are all given extensive space. However, Durant spends an inordinate amount of time describing the thought of Herbert Spencer, who today is nearly forgotten. Does all this mean this book is not worth reading? No, it doesn't. I've given it Four Stars, for the reasons stated earlier. It does cover the thought of certain philosophers in a way that is reasonably complete (for an overview) and relatively easy to understand. However, one should not read this book as though it were a general introduction to the story of philosophy.

The lives and thoughts of western philosophers woven into history. The author describes the lives of the philosophers and the influences on their thinking, their philosophies and compares them to earlier and contemporary thinkers. He adds insight through documenting public criticisms and finally adds his own personal thoughts. Well written with good flow and continuity. The author only superficially mentions eastern thought and weighs his own opinion heavily (see his comments on Stoicism). The distinction between the authour's thought and the philosopher's thought is occasionally blurred by the authors style. Well written, thoughtful, very interesting and fairly easy ro read.

I guess I won't go through the contents of the book again, easily available in other reviews as well as accessible on the product page. I'll just leave a few impressions that, I have to note, come from a non-philosopher. One is that I had no trouble with the print in my copy. It was all neat and readable. Another is Will Durant doesn't exactly skip the pre-Socratic guys, but only mere mentions of them are tucked away towards the beginning of the chapter on Aristotle. The choices look a little odd sometimes. There are chapters on Voltaire and Herbert Spencer but none on John Stuart Mill. I'm not complaining. It's just that I've always thought of Voltaire as kind of flighty and of Spencer as more of a sociologist than a philosopher. It was published in 1926 so the prose may seem a little stilted to modern readers although never murky. What I like most about Durant's take on these characters? Each chapter ends not with a round of applause for what the guy contributed but ultimately or, well, penultimately with a section labeled "Criticism." They were geniuses but even genius has its limits. We know that Alexander the Great was a pupil of Aristotle and sent him specimens he collected during his Eastern sojourn but what became of all that natural history? Basically nothing. Greek scientists ran into a methodological dead end because they didn't have measurement tools that were sufficiently precise to allow them to do very much -- no precise scales, no thermometers, no lenses, no algebra. They may have thought they were on top of things but the belief was illusory, as it is with us. It also strikes me as dated in that some of the philosophers covered -- major figures all -- might today be replaced by others. John Dewey, presaged I guess by Montaigne, gave us Montessori Schools and all that. He's all around us. But I wonder, if this were being written today, Durant might have found some space for Charles Sanders Peirce, who begat semiotics, an obscure method of analysis that has influenced fields as diverse as literature and behavioral science. Peirce isn't mentioned but a lot of other figures are discussed in the various chapters labeled with someone else's name. You'll find a bit of Hegel and Fichte in the chapter on Schopenhauer, for example. He's done a marvelous job of making the notoriously incomprehensible Immanuel Kant comprehensible. One good definition of "hell" would be having to learn enough German to plow through Kant and then pass a killer exam on him. (Freud, by contrast, won a Goethe Prize for his literary style.) One reason Kant is difficult is that he rarely used examples. Since I am a much better writer than Kant ever was, I will now ask a question about Kant, answer it, and give an example of what I mean. Are Kant's observations in any way relevant to some of the problems facing us today? Yes. Here is Durant on Kant's view of religion and reason: "The nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression (p. 212)." Intelligent design, anyone? How about abortion? For all his erudition, Durant is unable to explain one of the greatest mysteries in the history of philoosophy -- whatever happened to Rene Descartes? It is an historical fact that on a Saturday night, Descartes visited a wine shop and asked for a glass of red, which he then took to his accustomed table. Some time later the inn keeper noticed the glass was empty and asked him if he'd like another glass of wine. "I think not," replied Descartes, and vanished on the spot. Most of all, this is a pretty easy book to read. Some of the concepts and conceits may be strange to us but Durant has the happy ability to phrase them in everyday language. I'd recommend this book to a reader with any curiosity about philosophy, without knowing what it is, and who wants to learn about it without feeling, as in a nightmare, that he's wading in slow motion through a swamp of molasses about to be overwhelmed by some ogre that's going to eat his brain.

I am currently a student in high school who is on the debate team. I became interested in philosophy about a year ago because of a certain type of debate I do; Lincoln Douglas, or L.D. This type of debating focuses heavily on philosophy. Before I purchased this book I already knew a bit of this and that about philosophy and a couple of the main philosophers because of L.D. I Purchased this book because I wanted to deepen my knowledge of philosophy. This book is wonderfully written and very understandable. Before I would be confused between who Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were and who exactly said what. After reading this I'm very clear on the differences between each. This is a wonderful book. If you're looking for something to clarify, deepen, and broaden your knowledge of philosophy this is the book to get. It also suggests further reading you can do on each philosopher it covers. I only wish this book covered eastern philosophy! If the author ever writes a book on eastern philosophy or already has I'm definitely going to get it! It's worth the money and pays for itself over and over again!

Will Durant is probably the greatest writer on philosophers of the last 200 years. That assessment is shared by many others, but for me is based both on his vast expertise on the subject but also the extremely high caliber of his writing. Each chapter captures the life and philosopher of a great thinker, from Plato to Voltaire and ends with Nietzsche. It is Durant's approach that makes it all so interesting and digestible (perhaps in small bites). You will feel like you know the man and his time, his contemporaries, how he was held in esteem or rivalry by his peers and what his influences are. But mainly it is dissecting the man's particular take on the nature of reality, nature, or the mind. So perhaps 50% actual passages of the Philosopher or his critics, and 50% Durant's flair for exposition and lending his understanding. For even the novice curious about perhaps a missing component of his education, this work is hard to surpass.

I bought this book a year ago (give or take a month)as a supplement to the reading I was doing on primary sources of philosophy. I was initially very excited by it but cooled rather quickly. From an entirely subjective standpoint, I would rate it two stars. It is, however, quite readable and is a little more high brow answer to Wikipedia. He criticizes with a gentle enough hand that I would feel petty to attack him too severely. It is the kind of book you could read in a weekend if you felt up to it, while a deeper look into the philosophers themselves will take years, and that makes the book worth wile. You are also sure to get kudos from your philosophy professor if you cite this book in a paper. I found this book to be heavy on biography, which is enjoyable. However, it is often merely caricature for some and mythology for his favorites (Plato, Bacon, Voltaire). I found the treatment of Kant and Schopenhauer(my favorites)to be brisk but he takes them much more seriously than I typically see out of the Anglo-American school. I have a serious problem with the exclusion of Rene Descartes, the only reference I recall being a backhanded snipe as he covers the French Materialists. This is truly unacceptable out of a work claiming to tell the "Story of Philosophy." Likewise, David Hume is AWOL, while scholasticism and John Locke receive mere blurbs. Brevity is not an excuse here considering the interminable chapter on Francis Bacon and the elevation of Santayana and Croce (who?). Voltaire himself is absolutely delightful to read, but he hardly ranks among the top notch philosophers. The long digression into his work and life hardly sheds light on the storm between Descartes and Kant. Any book about history runs the risk of expiring quickly but I would say the particular biographic details still seem current enough. And, unless you have partisan loyalties to some of the subjects (like I do), it can be quite enjoyable. I find this book to be most useful as an insight into the perspective of a Northeastern(U.S.A) leftist.

...sono un completo ignorante in materia filosofica, motivo per cui ho acquistato questo libro: penso sia ottimo per chi vuole infarinarsi in questa splendida materia. Come al solito dei libri scritti in lingua inglese, non si perde in un linguaggio troppo formale, preferendo la chiarezza della forma (anche per il primario obiettivo del solito ottimo Will Durant di scrivere un prodotto chiaro, che permetta a tutti di comprendere i concetti chiave della filosofia). Nonostante questi punti positivi, però, non lo definirei un vero e proprio libro di introduzione alla filosofia; purtroppo tale contraddizione credo derivi dalla somma cultura dell'autore, che da per scontati alcuni concetti. Per questo consiglio di abbinare un Dizionario della filosofia (idea sorta per caso a mia madre, che ne aveva uno delle superiori, e devo dire che ha reso la lettura più piacevole ed espansiva). Alla fin dei salmi lo consiglio a tutti: oltre a colmare una mia grande lacuna, mi ha anche dato quel senso di accrescimento personale che cerco sempre nelle letture.

Reading this book was like taking a tour of human thought. Mr. Durant is remarkably neutral in his analysis and sometimes a touch prone to exaggeration. The best thing about the book is the middle ground between giving too much and too less details. No wonder it is one of the most beloved books of all time.

i bought the paperback and it has very small paper size hard to read

Will Durant is my favorite historian, the way he writes and his own philosophy is incredible.

A milestone in the historiography of Philosophy. An excellent introduction to the subject.